‎Hamid Ahadi

More than 80 large private production companies that are involved in hundreds of ‎development plans employing tens of thousands of workers have issued warnings about ‎an approaching bankruptcy and worker unrest through letters they have sent to the ‎government.‎

Economic experts point to the three letters that independent economists sent to Iran’s ‎President Mahmud Ahmadinejad during his first and second year in office to confirm that ‎what is now happening in the economic sphere is what was expected, and the public and ‎the parliament now must ask the government why did it cover up its ignorance of the ‎country’s economic issues by belittling experts who were critical of the government’s ‎policies and accused them of collaborating with the enemy.‎

On Saturday, the Persian section of the BBC website announced that the debt of the ‎Iranian government to the private sector stood at 5,000 billion Toman (roughly equal to ‎‎$5.5 billion) and said that these companies have sent letters to the government have ‎mentioned the shortage of liquidity and their inability to pay the wages and benefits of ‎their workers at the end of the year. They ask government authorities to find a solution ‎for this problem. BBC economic experts write that the Iranian government owes 5,000 ‎billion Toman to the private sector at a time when the total development budget of the ‎government for the current fiscal year stood at about 14,000 billion Toman. In other ‎words the government owes about a third of its development budget to the private sector.‎

According to these reports, this incredible government debt has caused many large ‎companies to drift to the verge of bankruptcy so that they can not even pay the traditional ‎annual New Year and end-of-the-year bonus to their employees.‎

The magnitude of the problem for the country’s economic and monetary policies ‎becomes more evident when according to the Central Bank of Iran the banking system ‎overall is suffering from a shortage of liquidity because some of the large companies that ‎have lent money to the government have themselves borrowed large sums of money from ‎banks who now cannot pay off their debts because the government has not paid them ‎their loans.‎

In their negotiations with the banks that have lent them money, some of these companies ‎have indicated that they have lent the government loans that are many times larger than ‎the amounts loans that they have received, while the government has not been paying ‎them its dues.‎